Heather Altfeld

Calculus for Insomniacs

The sheep have been wandering in and out
of your sleepless nights for years, pirouettingthrough the rocky
pasture in their little foggy coatsbefore you can drift off and
dream a faultless terza rima

so try counting memories, a memory
for each boyyou ever kissed and then a memory for the onesyou
didn’t, count the ones who didn’t kiss back, the impetuous ones and
the ratty ones,

each an erect hominid with his grunts and
his murmurs, exuding the smell of old Keds, his inner life a
reproductive diorama, streaked in pink across the walls of Lascaux.

2

Then count the times you did acidor broke a
bone or lit a cigarette,the number of kids in third grade exiled
to juvie for setting Fedco on fire,

then count the fires you
yourself built, begin with your debut as a Bluebird, snuffing a
chimney full of bats, ponytailsscreaming, swiped by dirty wings.

3

Remember each shining pine needle burnedfor each of
your cold fingers, each match, each lump of wood gone to jeweled
flame. Then estimate the number of fires burning

right now
between Paris and Delhi, the faulty toaster fires and the Rockwell
fires, the trash can fires and the crematories, and when you run
out of fires,

count the battles that occurred between the fall
of Troy and the treaty of Locarno, count the pilgrims to Mecca
from Mohammed to the present, the flightsthey take over San
Francisco or Tehran,

the number of planes hanging out in the
cloudsabove your bed between midnight and threethe number of
mothers on each plane,each time each one offered a breast to a child

each of those children and each drop of milk,it is no lullaby,
lonely poet, last bard awakepreoccupied with the little packets of
time cronons in the night air you breathe

in and out while
counting your breaths in the Kundalini fashion.

4

Return to things that belong to you, arguments going backward
from the angry marriage, name the bitter dreams,

the regrets.
Count the seasons from nowto your birth, count the rains you can
remember,then the rain itself, estimate the number of dropsthat
fell in the moment you tied a velvet ribbon

in your daughter’s
hair. Imagine the unimaginable infinitude of drops that downed
Houston and Western Louisiana and Bangladesh,even just the drops
in the odd-numbered years,

divide by the average number swallowed
by one person before their lungs closed, no remainder. Probably
within a tenth of a percentof the number of refugees floating at sea
on a Saturday morning

which roughly equals the number of stars in
the firmament you can see through the ring made between your thumb
and your index finger on a cold clear night. The sheep have long
fled your aimless sheparding

so tally the ark of all extant
animals, first by kingdom, then order, then by the finer Linnean
taxonomies, an oracle to the order of demise, add the beasts

whose fangs once sharpened the stonesof caves and those who
knived the reefs with their saw-teeth, the lizard-hipped quads,
the Silurian fish, the trilobites and their cryptic whorls,

dream a translation of the Cambrian poem encrypted in their spines.
Add what is left,their names and their tusks and their bones,
chart each on the quadratic parabola of longing.

5

Make piles of the tiny tertiary snails encased in the amber of
Prussiacount them and sand them and emboss themin cheap sterling
for the sixty-two women

who will stop at the stand at the corner
of 5th and 59th on Friday just before lunch at Bergdorfs to pay
a hundred bucks apiece, for which each snail, if traveling back in
time to its birth

will net a profit of approximately 0.00001
cents per century. Count your children. You should get the
number three. Then divide this number by the parenthetical

dreams, nightmares, and accidents, multiplyby the power of ten and
then again by the square root of the number of screws Archimedes
designed for his first ship, and this will give you

the
precise number of momentsyou have worried they will die before you
do.

6

Soon you will feel the violent tremble of sleep
arriving like a cattle car in the darkness

of what was once
Prussia, rattling the tracks as it pulls into the station of you.
The door slides open. Every passenger is one of your ancestors. The
cantor

and the beadle, the cobblerand the tinsmith, count
the days they livedbefore the fires and the rains, countthe
number of spoons they used

for their soup, how many footsteps
they took in their lifetimes, how many pounds of potatoes they
buried in their cellars, how many nights they lay awake

on
this fierce and glittering planet,counting and assembling with tape
and gluethe cells that now form your eyelids, pressed against
the white pillow

as you drift off, your lashes fluttering at
last, the millions of downy feathers beneath you dreaming the
geese who now shiver without them.

HEATHER ALTFELD's first book, The
Disappearing Theatre won the Poets at Work Book Prize, selected by
poet Stephen Dunn. Her poems appear in Narrative Magazine, Pleiades,
ZYZZYVA, and many other literary journals. She is the recipient of
the 2017 Robert H. Winner Award with the Poetry Society of America and
the 2015 Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry, and she received second prize in
this year’s Literal Latte contest. She teaches in the Honors Program as
well as for the English and Humanities Departments at CSU Chico, and she
is at work on two more collections of poetry as well as two books for
children.